Limiting prevents signal peaks from ever exceeding a chosen threshold, and is generally used to prevent short-term peaks from reaching their full amplitude. Used judiciously, limiting produces higher average levels, while avoiding overload (clipping or distortion), by limiting only some short-term transients in the source audio. To prevent the ear from hearing the gain changes, extremely short attack and release times can be used.

Limiting is used to remove only occasional peaks because gain reduction on successive peaks would be noticeable. If audio material contains many peaks, the threshold should be raised and the gain manually reduced so that only occasional, extreme peaks are limited.

Limiting generally begins with the ratio set at 10:1 and higher. Large ratios effectively limit the dynamic range of the signal to a specific value by setting an absolute ceiling for the dynamic range.